taiyo no otosan wrote:Is this thread about lyrics we like, or that haunt us? Surely, there's a difference?

It's hard to know quite how to do this but it would be good to compile a treasury of elegant and well articulated lines from the world of music.
How would we control an unnecessary deluge? ....(self regulation / self control / concentrate on one subject at a time?)
How many more lists can we take?.......(one?)
How would we avoid pointless debates about Dylan vs WB Yeats or the like?...............(just say "no" ?)

I thought of this idea yesterday whilst listening to Graham Parker's "Silly Thing"
"The words just won't come the right way,The pen won't listen to a thing I say.".........Beautiful.

and of course, a line that describes a similarly debillitating feeling -

The whole of Johnny Cash's version of 'Hurt' sort of haunts me, but especially the line 'Everyone I know goes away in the end'.

And don't know if this is strictly a haunting, but the lines 'Go ahead and call the cops/You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops' from Tom Waits's 'Hold On' have been blowing around my mind the last few weeks.

I've just recently finished working on a Peter Green 4-CD-plus-book boxed set titled 'Anthology' (Salvo). Listening repeatedly to the songs, whilst arranging a running sequence, it's hard not to be haunted by the nihilism of a chart hit lyric that goes:

‘I wish that I'd never been born’ ('Man Of The World')

The one that has haunted me, however, since I first heard it sung on the radio by Josh White in the early '60s (but later grew to love, if that's the right word, by Billie Holiday) is 'Strange Fruit':

'Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.'

John Crosby wrote:The one that has haunted me, however, since I first heard it sung on the radio by Josh White in the early '60s (but later grew to love, if that's the right word, by Billie Holiday) is 'Strange Fruit'....

...Yes, there's nothing really quite as haunting as that.

I would have to agree. When I was a child, my mother often listened to Billie Holiday. The only lyrics I heard in "Strange Fruit" were "black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" and I thought it was a pretty song, though slow and a little sad, about dancing in an orchard. My mother quit playing that particular record and it wasn't until quite a few years later that I came across "Strange Fruit" again. The horror I felt when I listened to the lyrics and realized the horrors within the song still haunts me.